


Can I Realign?

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Series: I Think I'm On Another World With You [2]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mutants, F/F, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 00:39:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16800247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: Clara Oswald has never been Normal. Still able to remember the time Before, back when kindness was currency, she muddles through life After, helping her own kind as best as she can.So when she meets a woman with fear in her eyes and fire in her palms, she resolves to help her. Fire meets ice; two forces of destruction coming together and forging a shared path based on their similarities.Neither of them realise exactly what’s at risk. Not until it’s too late.





	Can I Realign?

**Author's Note:**

> This fic came to be following a weird weekend which planted the seed of an idea in my brain of a character having powers they can't control, with which they end up hurting others by accident. The idea kind of grew into 'Thirteen has powers she can't control', which then became 'Thirteen has pyrokinetic powers she can't control', at which point my brain went "MAKE IT GAY," so enter Clara. The ultimate product is this fic, in which Clara has lowkey become Elsa from Frozen, less the snowman. The word count kind of snowballed (ha) from there.
> 
> Title comes from "King" by Years & Years.
> 
> This is my first attempt at sci-fi world-building outside my usual remit of the canonical Whoniverse. Please be gentle with me.

_Some say the world will end in fire,_  
_Some say in ice._  
_From what I’ve tasted of desire_  
_I hold with those who favour fire._  
_But if it had to perish twice,_  
_I think I know enough of hate_  
_To say that for destruction ice_  
_Is also great_  
_And would suffice._

* * *

Clara recognises the look the stranger is giving her. She’s seen it in people like her before, and she knows what it represents. 

It means fear. 

It means isolation. 

It means _leave me alone_. 

The woman is stood, stricken, on the other side of the pavement from her, looking like she wants nothing more than to melt back into the shadows and disappear into London’s dark underbelly. Her eyes are darting from side to side like a cornered animal, so the first thing Clara does it hold up her hands submissively, in a universal gesture intended to convey that she poses no threat. She knows she shouldn’t approach the stranger – everything about the woman’s feral expression and terrified body language screams that she wants to be allowed to vanish, and Clara knows the dangers that cornered people pose. She had been one once, many years before, almost destroying an entire building as her sheer terror had crystallised in her veins. This woman is the same, an unknown quantity, and everything about the situation stacks the odds against her. 

But Clara has never been one for playing it safe. 

Even if refusing to do so means she’s likely get hurt, she’d long ago resolved to help those in need, and she’s seldom encountered another of her kind as in need as this woman. She smiles at the stranger and watches the defensive look fade from her eyes, replaced by one she hasn’t seen in a long time. It’s the kind of look that she had once seen staring back at her when she looked in the mirror, and it’s enough to make her overlook the previous warning signs and step closer to the strange woman with dirty blonde hair, despite her instincts screaming at her to run.

The look in the woman’s eyes is one that communicates a desire for contact and kinship; a look that communicates the desire to be part of something – _anything_ , as long as it brings a degree of belonging and companionship. Clara’s heart aches in her chest as she takes another step closer, grateful for the emptiness of the street and the darkness of the night, and desperate to help this woman before she falls prey to roving packs of Normals. No one sane should be out after nightfall in London – but then again, Clara has never considered herself to be particularly in her right mind. Perhaps the stranger feels the same, or simply doesn’t know the risks. Still. Tonight, her own foolhardy lack of care has brought her to this stranger, so perhaps it isn’t entirely a bad thing. 

“Hello,” she says, in as bright a tone as she’s able to manage, trying to offer a veneer of normalcy to the encounter; a reminder of the world as it was. She forces herself to smile, an almost-forgotten relic of a long-ago life, and she leaves her hands held up – a visible indicator that she isn’t about to reach for any concealed weapons or launch an attack. She remembers police using the same gesture in the time before, although it had often been a ruse or deliberate piece of misdirection, and she tries not to wince at her recollection of her final encounter with the law, in which the officer’s open hands had distracted her long enough to miss the glint of steel. “I’m Clara.” 

The woman gives her with an up-and-down look; a perfunctory appraisal that Clara recognises all too well. It’s a judgement, certainly, but not of the prejudicial variety – it’s intended to see if she can be trusted; if she can provide assistance; and more importantly, if she’s one of Them or not. She’ll have to prove herself or risk frightening the stranger, and so slowly, ever so slowly, Clara holds out her right hand, extending it into the space between them. She watches the woman tense up as she does so, almost cat-like as her muscles coil in readiness to bolt, and she wants to speak, but she knows that what she is about to do will win the stranger over far more than any words ever could. Turning her palm over, Clara uncurls her fingers and produces a tiny heap of snow, which sits in her palm, shimmering in the flickering amber streetlight, as the stranger looks on in fascination.

“You’re like me,” the woman says in awe, and Clara is surprised to find that her accent is warmly familiar – northern, full of rough vowels and kindness and a soft reminder of home. “You’re…” 

“I am. Look, you’re alone, aren’t you?” Clara asks, brushing the snow off her hand before anyone can appear or see what she’s done. She can’t risk exposing herself to danger; not if she’s going to help this woman. “And you’re scared.” 

“I…” the stranger chews on her lip, her frightened expression from earlier reappearing before she raises her chin and asserts, in a tremulous voice: “No, I’ve got friends. I’m meeting them here.” 

“No, you haven’t.”

“Excuse me?!” 

“You wouldn’t be out here alone if you had friends. Friends don’t let friends walk these streets after dark; especially not if those friends are like us.” 

“It’s London,” the woman mutters, wrapping her arms around herself and looking abruptly small and shy. Her bluster fades in an instant, and when she speaks again she sounds uncertain. “I thought it was supposed to be safe down here.” 

“Let me guess,” almost at once, Clara knows what the woman is implying. She’s seen what happens when Normals meet her kind and lash out in fear, but she’d hoped the prejudice she’d encountered in her youth had faded into a thing of the past. Now, she’s reminded of the toxic environment of her hometown, and finds herself disappointed yet unsurprised to learn that things in the north of the country haven’t changed. “The Purges?” 

There’s a brief pause, and then the woman nods once; little more than a rough jerk of the head to indicate her concurrence. She lowers her head and looks down at the pavement, and Clara knows she must be reliving the horrors she’s been through. She can’t help it – her mind flicks back to a different time and a different place, and people she had once considered friends snarling at her in furious, self-righteous anger. She swallows thickly, trying to banish the memory and focus on the woman in front of her. 

“Do you need somewhere safe to go now?” Clara asks, dipping her head and forcing the stranger to meet her gaze, trying to convey her trustworthiness through her expression. “I’m not leaving you out here on your own. It’s not safe.”

“I…” the blonde woman dithers for a moment, visibly unsettled by the unexpected offer. “I’ll be fine, really. I mean… it’s not like… I don’t even know you, or if you’re dangerous, or anything like that. You might be an axe-wielding psychopath. Besides, you’d only get hurt. I… I tend to hurt people. I don’t mean to… just… I can’t always… yeah.” 

“I…” it takes Clara a moment to realise what the stranger is implying, and her eyes widen in disbelief. “Are you an Untamed?” 

“No,” the woman says at once, shaking her head fiercely and clenching her fists at her sides as she physically recoils from Clara like she’s been burned. Looking down at the woman’s hands, Clara realises the aptness of her comparison; even in the artificial twilight of the city street, Clara can see the stranger’s fists beginning to simmer, and whereas she should have felt a stab of fear she can instead muster only pity and fascination. “No, I’m not.” 

“I can tell that you are,” Clara says softly, reaching towards the stranger with an outstretched hand, hoping against hope she’ll take it. “And that’s alr-” 

“Leave me alone,” the woman snarls, taking a step back and raising her fists. A bulbous sphere of orange fire drops from each hand onto the pavement, turning the tarmac around her into a simmering mess of fumes and scalding liquid, and as quickly as her anger and the flames have flared, they fade and die. “Oh, god…” 

“I can help you,” Clara whispers, before crouching and placing a palm to the seething tar, watching as the liquid freezes back to its approximate prior shape. It isn’t perfect, but it should cover their presence here until morning. “I can-” 

She looks up to find herself alone, and swears under her breath.

* * *

Clara isn’t stupid. She’s traced Untameds in the past, and she vows that this time will be no different. The woman’s mistake – involuntary or not – had been revealing the nature of her gift, and so Clara commits to reading the newspapers each day, watching and waiting for a pattern to reveal itself. She’s done this before, a handful of times, and she is more than willing to do it again for this stranger, although she can’t quite explain why. Perhaps it’s the haunting way the woman had looked at her, visibly yearning for companionship, that resonates with her, but she dedicates herself wholly to the pursuit of the strange woman with the burning hands, hoping and praying that she can find her before anyone more sinister does. 

She doesn’t know what she’ll do when she locates her – she’s never planned something like this before, and her usual level of involvement is strictly limited to smuggling Untameds via her flat into the safety of the Unique Underground, but something about this woman captures her interest enough to consider helping her herself. She remembers, over and over, the way the woman had dropped her twin fireballs to the pavement and then cursed, and she begins to wonder if the stranger is an anomaly – not an _intentional_ Untamed, but one whose abilities have been contained against her will. If that is the case, that’s unusual enough for her to know that the woman needs her all the more, and so she devotes herself to her task with a resolute single-mindedness that begins to take over her life.

The pattern that emerges is slow to develop – unusual fires that spring up without explanation in parts of the city usually considered ‘safe’. One or two a week at first, then at least one a day, and Clara realises that with each news report that comes, the Untamed’s panic is likely to be spiking, and her control – what limited control she _has_ – is going to increasingly falter. It’s a slippery slope, and one she has watched end in tragedy too many times before. She needs to intervene. She needs to help. Her mother, before she’d been taken away, had made her promise that she would help those in need, and this woman is as alone and desperate as Clara has found anyone, Untamed or not. 

Once she’s pored over news reports until her eyes ache, created a mental map of the afflicted part of the city, and has something approximating a plan, she dons her darkest jacket and steps out into the night. She avoids several Normals as she treks across the capital, fighting the urge to cringe away from them as she passes, and she recalls with a shudder the days before everything changed, when there had been public transport and everyone was crammed into boxes together, Normal and Unique alike. Those times are nothing more than a memory now; so she trudges on, determined not to allow herself to be distracted from her quest by recollections of the world as it was. This is the new normal now, although she is far from it, and she forces herself to mutter a mantra to herself as she walks.

 _Find her. Save her. Find her. Save her._

The junkyard she arrives at is at first glance deserted. It’s dark and full of burnt-out vehicles that to a casual observer might appear long-abandoned, but upon placing her hand against a nearby car bonnet, Clara finds the metal still imbued with heat. Whatever – _who_ ever – has done this, they were here recently. The husks look to be the products of a lack of control, perhaps, or a desire for light and warmth, but Clara can’t say she’d blame the culprit either way. 

Sidling further into the compound, she finds herself in the centre of a circle of vehicles reduced to twisted metal, and stinking heaps of ash that might once have been tyres. Above her, a rusted sign bearing the word _Foreman_ sways in the breeze, creaking ominously, and a rusted metal barrel lays ahead of her, smoke billowing from the top, offering a further clue that the cause of the destruction is still nearby. 

“Hello?” Clara calls, her voice low and tentative. “Hello, I don’t know if you remember me. I’m the woman from the other day – the woman with the snow.” 

There’s nothing but silence by way of response, but she ploughs on regardless. 

“I know you’re frightened, and I know you keep causing accidents. I’m not here to berate you for that – I’m not the police, and I’m not like the Normals. I don’t want to hurt you, or keep you subjugated. I just want to help you take control of your abilities. You need to keep yourself safe.” 

There’s the sound of hesitant footsteps, and Clara keeps talking, hoping against hope that she isn’t wrong and that she isn’t about to find herself face to face with the dregs of Normal society. She’s seen places like this before, populated by people on both sides of the tracks. Neglected landscapes of discarded objects, inhabited by people that society had tried hard to forget. 

“I’ve seen this happen before. You get scared and everything snowballs and it gets worse and worse and the Normals… they get scared. They panic. They do the only thing they know how to do – they destroy. I can’t let that happen to you. I won’t.”

“Why not?” the same Yorkshire voice from before asks from the darkness, and Clara squints through the acrid smoke. “Why can’t you just let them rip me to shreds? It would be easier than living like this.”

“What? Living in darkness? Living in fear? You don’t have to live like this. You can live in the open; you just need help to tame your gift and control your abilities.” 

“I don’t… I don’t know how.” 

“I thought as much. Why? What did they do to you?” 

From behind the blackened shell of something that might have once been a Land Rover, a ball of flame sparks into life. Lifted upwards until it illuminates the stranger’s features, it reveals a face smeared with soot, and eyes that are wide and afraid.

“No one ever showed me how to control it,” she whispers, her eyes growing wet with tears as she makes her confession. “My parents… they weren’t… they didn’t want a child like me.”

“Wasn’t there anyone… there was no history of being Unique? No friends, no extended family?”

“I was a mutation,” the woman says mechanically, and Clara knows she’s repeating phrases she’s heard a thousand times before. The stranger flicks her wrist and suspends the ball of flame in mid-air, the words tumbling out of her in a flood. “That’s what they told me on my fifth birthday. They kept me in my room; covered the floor with sand so I couldn’t burn the place down. No toys. No furniture. If asbestos hadn’t been so hard to find, I suspect they would have wrapped me in it from head to toe. Couldn’t risk me having any accidents, could we?” 

“What happened? How did you escape?” 

“When the Purges came, they… they weren’t too conscientious about keeping the other Normals away from me. I remember everything burning, and then I ran and I ran and I ran, and I came here because I thought it would be safe. I was wrong.” 

“You weren’t wrong. You _can_ be safe here, you just need help.”

“Why would you want to help me?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do.”

“But I’ll hurt you. I hurt people; that’s what I do. I lose control and I burn things and I destroy what I touch.”

“You’ve already destroyed a lot of London,” Clara affixes her with a rueful grin, and for the first time the stranger’s face breaks into the approximation of a smile in response to Clara’s teasing. “And I can tell you now, if you destroy any more, the Normals will work it out like I did. They’ll find you, and they’ll kill you. I’ve seen it happen in the past, and I won’t let it happen again. Not to you. Not to anyone. I don’t care about your warnings; I will do everything in my power to help you.”

“How do I know I can trust you?”

“You don’t. But I ran here too once, and I’ve seen so many of our people die that I swore not to let it happen again,” Clara holds out her hand, a non-verbal invitation. “Please. Come with me.”

After a moment’s hesitation, the stranger takes it, then looks down at their clasped hands in wonder.

“You’re…”

“What?”

“People… people usually don’t do that.”

“What? Hold your hand? Why?”

“What I touch, I burn,” the woman shrugs, but Clara can still see tears in her eyes. “Things. Buildings. People. Well, people, except… you. Inexplicably.”

“Fire meets ice,” Clara decides to take the lack of pain in her palm as a positive omen. “Either we melt together, or we extinguish each other, I suppose.”

“So it goes…” the woman blinks, then nods, her face a mask of gratitude. “God, I’m sorry, I don’t even know your name. You’re saving me, but I don’t even know who you are.”

“Clara.”

“Sephy.”

“Sephy?”

“Persephone. It means ‘bringing death.’ My parents thought it was apt.”

* * *

The first thing Sephy does, upon arrival in Clara’s tiny flat, is take a bath. There are mumbled apologies from Clara about a lack of hot water that are met with blank incredulity from the Untamed, and it’s not until she watches Sephy’s hand touch the surface of the water that she understands. Steam begins to form, then bubbles, and she laughs out loud at the sheer wonder of it as her bathtub begins to simmer like a cauldron.

“That’s…” she shakes her head, trying to find the right words. It’s been a long time since she found awe in her own gift, but she can still see the joy in those of others. “That’s amazing. Makes mine look like a parlour trick.”

“Show me yours again,” Sephy asks, reaching for Clara’s hand with both of hers. She’s like a child, wide-eyed and exuberant, and something about her lack of understanding prompts Clara to show off. As Sephy stares down at her palm in eager anticipation, Clara closes her eyes and concentrates, and a second later it begins to snow in her poky bathroom.

“But you…” Sephy looks up at the flurries that are now swirling around them. “Your hands…” 

“It’s not about your hands,” Clara says softly. “Have you never noticed? It’s about what you feel, not what you touch.” 

“I…” she flushes a deep, mortified maroon. “I’ve never thought about it.” 

“And that’s alright,” Clara reminds her with an encouraging smile. “Honestly. That’s alright. You’re going to notice. You’re going to learn. And you’re going to be amazing.”

* * *

It’s been a long time since Clara’s last taught anyone, but the theory of it is not the kind of thing she can forget – not when it was once such a large part of her life. She scans over her notes the night before their lessons are due to begin and readies herself, finding herself enthused about the challenge Sephy poses.

She thought she’d seen it all during her time in London. Her flat had been flooded, shocked, shaken, and overrun with jungle-like foliage that took weeks to remove entirely. She’d thought she was unshockable, but she’s never seen someone like Sephy before. 

In their first lesson, her sofa is set alight. In the time it takes for her to react and conjure enough snow to extinguish the flames, the back is engulfed in amber light, leaving the horizontal cushions largely untouched. For that, if nothing else, she is grateful. Singed cotton-mix is still better to sit on than the floor. 

In their second lesson, her curtains burst into a merry blaze, illuminating the flat in myriad shades of orange and red. 

In their third lesson, the ceiling turns a poisonous shade of red, and droplets of fire rain down on the two of them as Sephy sobs in the centre of the room.

“I’m sorry,” she weeps, rocking back and forth and clutching her knees to her chest as she cries. “I’m sorry, I can’t do this… I’m never going to be able to do this.” 

“You are,” Clara says softly, attempting to make it snow but finding them doused in tepid rain instead. “I promise, you are.” 

“I’m not. I’ve destroyed your things, I’ve destroyed so much, and I just… I should leave.” 

“No,” Clara says insistently, reaching over and taking Sephy’s hand in hers in a bid to distract the Untamed from her own spiralling feelings of uselessness, and the inevitable further destruction that such negative thoughts would spark. “No, you shouldn’t.”

Above them, the scarlet miasma clears as Sephy looks up at her. 

“You really believe in me?” 

“I really believe in you.”

* * *

Progress is slow. Clara takes to explaining the smell of burning to her neighbours as her failed attempts at cooking, and she stops trying to replace the things that are damaged in their endeavours to learn. She resigns herself to living simply, and focuses on working with Sephy to manage her energies and limit the chaos caused by their lessons. There’s not only the lack of control to consider, but a far more insidious problem; Sephy’s lack of belief in herself is impeding on her own abilities, and Clara is unsure how she can do any more to facilitate the self-esteem necessary to continue her learning.

“I can’t do it,” Sephy says for the thousandth time that month, burying her head in her hands. “I can’t. Clara, I’m sorry. I should go. I should just move on and forget about all of this.” 

“Why?” 

“Because I’m hurting you. I’m destroying your life, in every sense.” 

“No, you’re not.” 

It’s true. In the time they’ve spent together, Clara has started to recall the simple joy of having another person to share her not only space with, but also her life. She hasn’t spent a prolonged period of time with anyone since… well, she shies away from the thought of _his_ name, but she still recalls his face each time she closes her eyes. How could she not? He had been instrumental in saving her life, which renders her responsible for upholding his memory. 

“I am.” 

“You’re not destroying my life. You’re making it better just by being in it,” Clara confesses, reaching out with a tentative hand and placing it on Sephy’s shoulder. The contact ignites a metaphysical spark between them that takes them both by surprise, and she blinks down at her own hand before returning her attention to Sephy. “I promise you. Having you here… it’s changed everything.”

* * *

“Tell me your story,” Sephy says one evening, staring at Clara over the top of a small, bobbing ball of flame. In the weeks they’ve been together, her control has grown, and the flickering light the organic lantern casts out is a pale shade of yellow, illuminating the room with a soft, candle-like glow. “Why are you here? You say you’re not hiding, but you are.”

“I’m not hiding,” Clara shoots back instinctively, bristling involuntarily at the very accusation. “I’m just… living carefully.” 

“But you don’t live; you barely even leave the flat.” 

“I don’t need to,” Clara looks down at the plate of dinner she’s been picking at for the last ten minutes, then sets it down on the floor, her appetite waning in anticipation of the conversation she knows they’re about to have. “I can work from home. I _do_ work from home, remember? In between trying to teach you.”

“But you advocate living openly.”

“I know I do, and I live as openly as I dare to.” 

“Which isn’t very, so what’s the difference between this and just… living underground? Hiding properly? You keep telling me to be authentic to myself and accept who I am, but you’re not accepting of _yourself_ , and you’re not living honestly. Your neighbours don’t even know what you are.”

“They will soon if we aren’t careful,” Clara mutters, then looks up and catches Sephy’s look of hurt at the passive-aggressive comment. “Sorry. I didn’t… sorry. They won’t. You’re… they won’t find out about you, or about me. I promise.”

“So, why don’t they know what you are? If you’re so intent on accepting yourself, just tell them!” 

“No.” 

“Why?!” 

“Because the last time I told Normals what I was, they killed my boyfriend.” 

The words hang between them, heavy and uncomfortable, for a long few seconds. Sephy looks stricken by the revelation, and then suddenly lurches into motion, half-lunging half-stumbling across the room and enfolding Clara in an awkward hug. It’s the first embrace Clara has been party to in years, and she freezes for one tense moment before relaxing into Sephy’s touch and closing her eyes, intent on savouring the physical contact and all that it signifies. Neither of them are entirely sure where to put their arms or their heads, but they fit together eventually, finding a comfortable position and holding it.

“I’m sorry,” Sephy mumbles after several minutes of silence tick past, neither of them in a hurry to pull away from the other. “I’m sorry, I didn’t… was he like us?” 

“Yes,” Clara whispers. “He was. He was strong – not like a Normal could be, but strong enough to make people sit up and take notice. He could stop a train on its tracks, but he couldn’t stop them from murdering him. They killed him where he stood, and they would’ve killed me too if he hadn’t sacrificed himself to distract them, trying to satisfy their blood lust.” 

“I’m sorry,” Sephy says again, clinging to Clara like a lifeline, and Clara feels a rush of affection for the awkward, unconventional woman now melting under her touch. “You don’t have to… you shouldn’t feel…I shouldn’t have… how are you still carrying on?” 

“Because it’s what he would have wanted,” Clara sighs, closing her eyes against the tears that threaten to overwhelm her. “Because it’s the right thing to do. Because I need to help others.” 

“Like me?” 

“Yes,” Clara says softly, burying her head in Sephy’s shoulder as she feels her eyes a single tear bisect her cheek. “Like you.”

* * *

After that, the hugs become commonplace – a feature of the day that’s as inevitable as breakfast or lunch or dinner. Clara tells herself that it’s the novelty of physical contact that drives Sephy’s affection, or simply the novelty of being able to touch someone else without consuming them in flames. Clara can hardly begin to imagine the isolation Sephy must have faced in her life before, and so she allows herself to be hugged and touched and clung to without complaint, knowing the importance of what it represents.

If she’s honest with herself, Clara knows it isn’t just Sephy that enjoys the hugs. To be held by another person once again is almost intoxicating, and she begins to initiate the small touches and warm hugs that come to characterise their evenings. In the daytime, they are nothing more intimate than teacher and pupil, but come sunset they become something akin to friends, not that Clara recalls what friends really _are_ , or what they do.

There’s something inherently fascinating about the way their gifts interact in the moments that they lose themselves in each other’s embrace. When they fold into each other’s arms, there’s a feeling of warmth – as they both try to explain to each other, one that is at once physical _and_ spiritual, running more than skin-deep – that creeps over them, and they become accustomed to the microclimates that occur when Sephy allows herself to cry at the recollections of her past. With her outbursts of emotion come tiny showers of singeing flames that flutter earthwards in uneven flurries, and something instinctual takes place in Clara, who finds herself at the heart of an attempted blizzard. She’s growing increasingly accustomed to watching her usual snowstorms reduced to fine drizzle as they meet Sephy’s apocalyptic-seeming storms, and they both slowly adjust to the strangeness of being enveloped in indoor rain in their rare moments of vulnerability.

Steaming hands. Frosty skin.

It’s unusual, certainly. 

But not unwelcome.

* * *

Sephy has been having the nightmares since her unanticipated arrival in Clara’s life. Some nights, the smell of burning polyester fills the flat, chemical and nauseating, and Clara finds Sephy stood at the kitchen sink, dousing a chunk of smouldering polyester with the contents of the washing up bowl, an apologetic expression playing over her features as another pillow crumbles to ash. After the first five, she’d stopped counting, and started sourcing them in bulk. It seemed easier, somehow.

And yet, inexplicably, since the first hug initiated between them, the nightmares have seemed to wane. Clara isn’t sure if there’s a link between the two; she’s not sure how she feels if there is, so she tries not to dwell on the matter. She suspects that there may be some correlation, certainly, but she doesn’t want to fall prey to her own narcissism and credit the downshift with her own influence, so instead she simply allows the embraces and gentle caresses to continue, observing quietly as the nightmares fade into the past. 

When they make an unwelcome, inevitable return, Sephy arrives at her bedside past midnight. She stands there like a pale, trembling ghost, her hair wild around her face and her eyes ringed with soot and sweat.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers in a hoarse voice, looking for all the world like the frightened child that Clara knows she is underneath it all. “Clara, I’m sorry. It happened again.”

As Clara lies there in the darkness, her heart breaking for the frightened Untamed woman stood before her, it seems perfectly natural to lift the edge of the duvet and invite Sephy into the warmth of her bed. Once the shaking woman has climbed in, Clara folds her into her arms and presses a kiss to her t-shirt clad shoulder, the smell of burning cotton thick in her nostrils as she does so. Sephy shifts in the embrace, stretching out and shaping herself against Clara’s prone form, and Clara can’t help but smile to herself at the sense of innate comfort it brings to be laid with another human being. 

“You’re cold,” Sephy hums sleepily, nuzzling into Clara as she speaks. “Very cold.” 

“You haven’t noticed before?” 

“Haven’t been this near to you before. Not like this.” 

Something about the words makes Clara’s cheeks colour, and even in the darkness, Sephy seems to sense it. She rolls over in Clara’s arms and smiles shyly, tilting her head as though that might aid her night vision. 

“You look cute when you blush.” 

“How do you know I’m blushing? It’s dark in here.” 

“I can tell,” Sephy murmurs in a worldly-wise tone. “Heat calls to me, remember?” 

“That _so_ doesn’t work with biology.”

“It does,” Sephy whispers. “It really does.”

“So, you make me burn,” Clara says, and it’s intended to be sarcastic and yet falls somewhat short. Sephy’s proximity to her has robbed her of the ability to joke, stealing her breath and taking her by surprise. “What about it?” 

“Nothing,” Sephy says, and Clara can sense her mouth twist into a smirk, even in the darkness. “Just… something to keep in mind.”

* * *

The nightmare is all-consuming in its intensity. Clara is frozen to the spot, unable to run as her boyfriend struggles in the grip of the six Normals clustered around him, all of them armed with ugly makeshift weapons that glimmer ominously in the moonlight.

“Run!” he bellows, struggling against their grasp, but she can’t – she wants desperately to do as she is bid and flee, but she’s also overwhelmed by the desire to help him. She can’t just leave him to his fate; can’t just abandon him to these thugs and the inevitable conclusion that will follow. “Clara, for god sake! Run!” 

She looks down at her own feet and gasps as she realises that there’s ice rushing out of the ground, shooting up around her ankles and encasing her legs in boots that feel like lead. She can solve this, easily – she’s been manipulating ice since she was old enough to roll over. She’s not a victim of her own power; she can break free as easily as focusing her attention downwards and picturing the ice shattering like glass. And yet… somehow she can’t. She tries and she tries and she tries, yet the ice only seems to grow thicker, creeping higher – encircling her chest, constricting her ribs, and impeding her ability to breathe.

“Clara?”

There’s another voice cutting over her boyfriend’s roars now, equally urgent and panicked.

“Clara? Wake up! Clara!” 

Her eyes snap open, and she can’t see. It’s dark, but that’s not the only thing rendering her blind – a perma-frost is encroaching in the space around her face, and just as panic starts to force its way up her throat, choking and insidious, she’s being kissed.

There’s a sensation of warmth flickering across her face, then the abrupt sensation of being doused in lukewarm water, and suddenly she’s free. She blinks at her saviour, who is now sat across from her with primrose-yellow flames licking around her head like an otherworldly halo.

“Sorry,” Sephy mumbles, sheepish in the half-light it casts. “I didn’t know how else to… you were talking to yourself and then there was just… I don’t know, ice everywhere and I couldn’t let you… I couldn’t let you die, Clara.” 

“Why?”

“Because you wouldn’t let me,” Sephy says softly, and there’s something so open and honest in her expression that Clara can’t help herself; she leans over and presses a kiss to her confused, half-parted lips. It takes a moment before Sephy responds, shy and uncertain, but when her hands find Clara’s cheek and she kisses her back, it feels _right._ It feels to Clara as though she’s finally come home.

* * *

Clara’s never been with a woman like herself before – only human ones; breakable and flawed and obsessed with her abilities, like she were some kind of circus sideshow. There’s something natural and easy about the way she and Sephy fit together; something comforting about falling asleep in the afterglow of their night-time liaisons with white flames licking over her skin, gentle as a feather.

Sephy is still, as ever, afraid. It’s a permanent state of being, Clara suspects, born of a life full of let-downs and a lack of love. There’s no way to reassure her – no words seem to do adequate justice to the seriousness Clara feels about keeping her newfound lover safe. So instead she tries to throw herself into teaching during the day and loving Sephy during the hours of darkness; a reassuring pattern, but one that quickly spills over and outside the confines of their life before. 

Clara finds herself embracing Sephy triumphantly when she succeeds in some small, inconsequential act just after noon. They kiss after lunch, moved to the simple act by the open pleasure in each other’s face at the discovery that there’s fresh fruit for pudding. They hold hands as they read, as lost in each other as they are in the texts they pore over. 

In the darkness before the dawn, she teaches Sephy, millimetre by shy millimetre, how she likes to be touched, and that she is not in fact as breakable as she appears. In time, Sephy begins to open up in reciprocation, and together they take the time to learn the map of each other’s skin, committing it to memory as though it were more precious than all the caveats of being who they are; the rules and regulations and means of control that seem – in the confines of their bed – to fade to inconsequentiality. It’s a process and a journey that begins to slip into their class time, until finally they admit that the former formal separation of learning and loving cannot be upheld and allow things to happen naturally, unhindered by a schedule.

Day by day, Clara finds her heart opening up, remembering how to love again. It’s this thought that drives her one day to take Sephy in her arms a little after sunrise; the ensuing hour becomes lost to emotion and honesty and an openness that takes both of them by surprise. By the time the sixty minutes have ticked away, there’s a cloud of steam enveloping them, and Sephy smiles sweatily at Clara, who flips her hair out of her eyes and returns the grin with tentative optimism.

* * *

The hammering on the door is jarringly loud in the small flat, driving them to their feet in synchronicity. It doesn’t cease, instead growing angrier and more insistent with each passing blow that falls on the wood, and muted threats begin to filter through to them. They both know what this means, although neither wants to believe it. Neither wants to believe that their world is about to splinter into incoherence, and so they freeze, as though by doing so they can avoid the inevitability of what is about to happen.

“Clara,” Sephy whispers, her hands clenching into fists instinctively and blindingly bright flames starting to lick up her arms. “Who…”

“Come out, freaks,” a voice outside snarls menacingly, and the pounding increases in intensity. Clara realises that failing to answer will not deter the angry group of Normals outside, and she looks to Sephy in blind panic. “We know what you are, and you aren’t welcome here Come on, freaks. Stop trying to hide, or we’re coming in.” 

“How…” Sephy’s uncertainty ebbs away at once, and she blinks at Clara in terror. Her fear becomes a tangible entity, settling over the two of them, heavy and oppressive. “How could they know about us? How-” 

There’s the sound of the front door splintering, and Clara doesn’t remember anything other than shouting at Sephy to run as her own body lurches into motion. 

It’s not until she reaches the end of the road, panting and terrified, that she realises she’s alone.

* * *

She knows that going back would be suicide.

She _knows_ that, and yet as she stands there, every fibre of her being screams at her to go back to the flat; to fight back against the invaders and flee again with Sephy safe in her arms. She should have waited. She should’ve taken Sephy’s hand before she ran. She should have attacked the Normals and secured her and Sephy’s safety, rather than fleeing as though she were guilty of something other than the crime of being born.

As guilt consumes her, hot and shameful, she rises onto the balls of her feet, weighing up her options for less than a second, and then starts to run. She crosses the tarmac in long, loping strides, before coming to a halt outside the building and gazing up at it in stunned horror.

The desolation is evident even from here – two walls are blown away; shards of glass and hunks of masonry are strewn over the pavement and molten metal is running in rivulets down the jagged concrete, exposed electrical cables sparking and hissing like snakes. She knows she only has minutes before the damage attracts more Normals to the scene; minutes before the blaze that’s smouldering within the structure hits a gas pipe and secondary explosions rip through the remains of what was once her home.

She doesn’t need to go inside to know that her flat no longer exists. 

She doesn’t need to go inside to know that there are no survivors.

She doesn’t go any closer.

She can’t bear the prospect of having to witness the unseeing, empty eyes of the woman who had depended on her for everything. 

Safety.

Knowledge.

Love.

* * *

Clara gives herself over to grieving, devoting herself to the pastime with the same absolute single-mindedness that she had once committed to finding and saving Sephy. Now, however, she finds a bolthole somewhere so downtrodden that even the name has long since faded from memory, and spends time given over to the bitter frigidity of own personal microclimate. Snow howls around her prone form incessantly, until the colour leaches from her hair and it freezes into jagged icicles that rattle when she moves. It’s an uncomfortably cheerful sound, and so she ceases to move, retreating into a blizzard of her own making in an attempt to numb her aching sense of loss. It’s nothing more than what she deserves; death by her own useless abilities. Abilities she couldn’t even use to save the woman she loved.

It’s her fault. She mumbles the words aloud, over and over, like a mantra, as though repetition might make them less true, and the wound caused by them less keen.

She should’ve waited; she should’ve taken Sephy’s hand. She should have made sure they ran together.

And now… now this is her punishment; she’s doomed to be alone.

It’s nothing more than what she deserves, and so she revels in it. As the days pass, she fills her new abode – it’s not a home; to call it such would imply a level of completeness she knows she will never again attain – with shards of ice and sheets of frost, keeping the world at bay and confining herself to a prison of her own design. 

An icy cage for the monster she sees in her own reflection.

* * *

When she wakes, she knows at once that something is different. Numb to the world though she is, she can still tell when something feels intrinsically wrong, and she senses at once that there is someone near to her – someone who shouldn’t be, which is to say, someone at all.

She rolls over with a profound sense of exhaustion, ready to face the Normals who have undoubtedly come to bay for her blood. She hasn’t the energy to fight them, nor to flee. She’ll face her execution with dignity, and as she raises her head to tell them that, she freezes. 

“Hello,” Sephy says softly, from her position perched on what passes for a chair in this new dwelling. “Oh, my Clara. What have you done to yourself?”

“I…” she doesn’t have the words to begin to explain, so she gestures around herself vaguely – waves her hand towards the jagged thorns of ice and shattered frost as though their existence serves as sufficient explanation. “I thought I’d lost you…” 

“You couldn’t ever lose me,” Sephy tells her. “You think I’d let them come between us? You think I’d let them stop us?” 

“I…” Clara swallows, unsure how to elucidate what she had seen and the conclusions she had – not unreasonably – drawn. “Sephy, I never… I saw the flat… I saw what happened to it… I thought…”

“I fought back. I don’t know what I did, but I woke up and they were gone, so I ran. I couldn’t find you, so I’ve been getting by; trying to learn and trying to grow but it’s… it’s not the same without you. I missed my favourite teacher.” 

“Don’t try to-” 

“Don’t try to what? Remind you that you’re not a monster? You’re not. You’re kind and empathic and you’ve never been guilty of anything other than loving me. You’ve taught me so much, but I learned some things on my own.” 

“Oh?" 

“Well, firstly, my parents were wrong about my name, It doesn’t mean ‘bringing death’ at all. It means ‘she who lights the darkness,’” Sephy smiles up at Clara, her eyes warm and triumphant. “Which fits me perfectly, Clara. Because you know what else I discovered?”

Clara shakes her head. 

Sephy takes a step closer, her expression unfathomably gentle as she asks: “At what colour does fire burn the brightest?”

“I don’t know,” Clara frowns, not comprehending. She shakes her head in surrender, listening to the rattling sound of the icicles clinging to her scalp. It seems an impossibly lonely noise now, and she feels a flush of shame regarding her unkempt appearance. Sephy deserves better than this; she deserves the woman she once was, not the hermit she has become. “I’m sorry, I don’t…”

“Come on Clara,” Sephy urges, dropping to her knees beside her and taking her hands in her own. The warmth emanating from her palms is scalding, but Clara feels no desire to pull away. This is what’s been missing from her half-life as of late, but it’s not enough to help her to piece together what Sephy is trying to communicate to her. “Think.” 

“I…” a thought occurs to her as she catches sight of the sparkle in Sephy’s eyes and finally understands. “Is it…” 

Sephy folds her into her arms, and flames burst into life around them – flames of a distinct hue; a colour that Clara has been familiar with since her earliest memories. 

“Blue,” Sephy whispers, kissing her before she can respond, smiling against Clara’s mouth, and she can feel the pain of the previous weeks melting away from her; the ice evaporating from her hair and dissolving into nothingness, taking her grief with it. She places her hands on Sephy’s cheeks and loses herself to the moment, feeling her strength return with each passing second, and only when they’re both short of breath do they break apart with the utmost reluctance. 

“I don’t care what happens now,” Clara tells Sephy in a low, fierce undertone. “I don’t care where we have to run. But I will never leave you behind ever again. I swear.” 


End file.
